We are proud to announce the opening of our ninth datacenter: Tokyo 2. There has been high demand for additional Linode capacity in this region and we’re excited to open up availability.

Tokyo 2 offers all of the features and services as our other datacenters, at standard Linode pricing. Connectivity into Tokyo 2 features a fine blend of peering and transit providers (with more to come) to ensure the highest possible bandwidth and lowest latencies.

Customers with Linodes in other datacenters (including Tokyo 1) wishing to move Linodes into Tokyo 2 can clone them to the new facility. The cloning method is recommended since you’ll be able to stage your services on their new IP addresses before changing your DNS records. Alternatively, you can open a support ticket and we can configure a migration for you.

Linode has completed initial Internet capacity upgrades in all facilities. All of our datacenters are now multihomed with several tier-1 transit providers and the largest peering exchanges in the world. This marks a milestone in Linode’s history: we now manage our own true service provider network, allowing us to deliver robust and reliable connectivity.

To accomplish this, our datacenters have been upgraded with Cisco ASR 9000 series edge routers, allowing us to scale to many terabits of capacity per datacenter. Currently, each datacenter has a few hundred gigabits of transit and peering, with more to come. We’re operating our network under ASN63949.

Why is this a good thing?

We are now completely independent to make routing decisions, allowing us to quickly route around trouble on the Internet in real time.

We’ve increased IP capacity to each facility by 5 to 10 times over our previous capacity amounts.

We have high capacity edge routers and self-lit fiber backhauls in carrier hotels providing many terabits of additional expansion capabilities. Since we are our own backhaul provider, bringing up additional capacity between locations is fast and easy.

We can do cool stuff in the future like inter-dc connectivity, per-customer VLANs, and Anycast announcements of some or all of our IP space.

Let’s take a look at the state of each datacenter:

Dallas

We chose 1950 Stemmons and 2323 Bryan Street, two major regional carrier hotels, as our points of presence in Dallas. Also known as The Infomart, 1950 Stemmons is one of the largest buildings in Dallas, measuring at over 1.5 million square feet. Power and connectivity are plentiful at the Infomart; the building has four diverse power feeds and 100+ carriers redundantly built into the building.

Fremont

While there are several good options for points of presence in the Bay Area, we decided on 11 Great Oaks and 55 S Market, two large facilities with great carrier diversity. These are our longest fiber spans, requiring amplification in order to take a trip under the San Francisco Bay.

Atlanta

In Atlanta we chose a single facility, 56 Marietta, to serve as our regional point of presence. This well-known carrier hotel was selected over all the other options in the Atlanta metro area simply because no other facilities could compete with Marietta’s connectivity. To ensure total physical redundancy, our diverse dark fiber enters 56 Marietta through different building entrances and lands in separate meet-me rooms using entirely distinct power systems.

Newark

In Newark, we chose to light points of presence in 165 Halsey and 111 8th Avenue, both famous carrier hotels in the NJ/NY metro area. We selected 165 Halsey in particular to give us physical diversity from the island of Manhattan. Having our physical footprint spread out over the entire New York metro area makes us much less susceptible to downtime during a catastrophic event like Superstorm Sandy.

London

In London, we chose 8/9 HEX and 14 Coriander Avenue to light points of presence. Because of the stature of these facilities and the more friendly peering climate in Europe, we are able to directly connect with hundreds of major networks over the largest Internet exchanges in Europe. This allows us to route up to 50% of our traffic over peering instead of transit, providing our customers with the shortest paths and lowest possible latencies to many of the largest European networks.

Singapore

Tier 1 networks in the South Asian transit market are much more siloed than in other parts of the world, making it difficult to provide good connectivity using any single provider. This presented an unforeseen challenge when launching this facility in 2015: for the first time, we needed to be truly multihomed. With this realization, we decided to delay Singapore so that we could install our first pair of Cisco ASR 9000s as edge routers and launch on what would become our global public ASN. The facility we chose for Singapore is well connected, obviating the need to light dark fiber to remote carrier hotels.

Frankfurt

Building on the experiences learned in Singapore, we now had a blueprint for all future Linode facilities. Choosing a colocation facility now considers how many quality networks are available to us, including in the colo facility itself. The Frankfurt datacenter is extremely well connected and we did not need to light dark fiber into remote carrier hotels.

Tokyo 2

Retrofitted: N/ATransit: NTT, Tata, PCCW (more to come)Peering: BBIX

We’re opening a brand new Tokyo facility next month. This will enable customers in the region to take advantage of several recent Linode announcements: KVM hypervisor, our latest plan specs including double the RAM and SSD servers, and mass availability. Stay tuned for the announcement within the next few weeks.

A privilege escalation vulnerability being branded as “Dirty Cow” (CVE-2016-5195) was recently discovered and fixed yesterday in the Linux Kernel. It has existed for 11 years, so pretty much every device running Linux is affected (this includes VMs, physical machines, mobile devices, and so on) and, in general, distros from every vendor are affected.

Linode has made available new 4.8.3 based kernels to address the issue – so if you’re running our kernels (as is the default), you should just need to reboot your Linodes to pick up the new kernel.

If you’re running a distribution’s kernel or your own kernel, you’ll need to apply updates on your own.

As always, there are subtleties and potential defenses and configurations which may make this a non-issue for your specific situation, so we’ll leave the assessment up to you – but our general advice is to upgrade your kernels and reboot as soon as possible.

Asbury AgileAsbury Park, NJ | October 7We’re off to Asbury Park again for Asbury Agile. Join us October 7 for this informal conference, intended for technology professionals and students. Afterward, enjoy happy hour on us! The event is being held at The Asbury, a new, top-rated hotel bordering Sunset Lake.

MHacks 8Detroit, MI | October 7-9
With a new venue in Detroit (historic Masonic Temple), Mhacks8 is going to be bigger and better than ever. Coders can stay caffeinated all weekend long at the Linode coffee and espresso station! Want to win a Samsung Galaxy Tablet? Use Linode for your project, and each member of your team could win one.

HackRUNew Brunswick, NJ | October 22-23
We’re heading to New Brunswick, NJ, again for HackRU. Stop by our table to get your hands on our new hackathon shirt and other cool swag! Ask us how you can score one of our survival kits. We’ll be there, start to finish, sharing ideas about how Linode can power your next project, and doling out $50 account credit.

CPOSCLancaster, PA | November 19
Central PA Open-Source Conference is a one-day technical conference with sessions for all levels of expertise. Linode will be at the Ware Center at Millersville University in downtown Lancaster, giving away swag and answering all your cloud-hosting questions. See you on November 9!

LISA16Boston, MA | December 7-8 Beantown, here we come! Linode will be at LISA16 in Boston for the vibrant exchange of core issues intrinsic to both traditional and evolving systems administration. Be sure to stop by booth #120, redeem some account credit and snag some swag.

We’re happy to announce our newest feature: Payments via PayPal. You can now add credit to your account by transferring funds from a PayPal account.

While any customer can use PayPal to fund their account, new customers will still need to sign up using a credit card. You can use PayPal from then on.

This is in part because we don’t yet have the ability to automatically transfer funds from PayPal. If you intend on paying only via PayPal, you will need to ensure that you have enough credit on your Linode account to cover your next invoice. Otherwise, our system will attempt to collect any remaining balance from the credit card you have on file.

What’s New?

Fedora Server 24 installs lighter than previous versions due to the Fedora Project removing some packages they felt were unnecessary for their server build. The Fedora 24 ChangeSet outlines the major library and software updates like GNU Compiler Collection 6, Nodejs 5.10 and Python 3.5.

How do I get Fedora 24?

A fresh disk image of Fedora Server 24 can be deployed directly from the Linode Manager. If you’re using an earlier version of Fedora, you can upgrade to version 24 using the DNF System Upgrade plugin. You’ll find instructions to do this and potential upgrade issues on Fedora’s Wiki.

It was 13 years ago today that Linode opened its doors and earned its first customers. Now, 13 years later, it’s amazing how much we’ve grown. According to a study by CloudHarmony, Linode is the 4th largest cloud provider to the top 10,000 Alexa websites, following only Amazon, Rackspace, and IBM. Not bad. We have helped over half a million customers, launched nearly 12 million Linode servers, and now have more than 100 employees, all while remaining independent and privately owned.

None of this would have been possible without the dedication and engagement of our employees, who care a great deal about you, our customer, and about the work we do. We’ve attracted some of the most passionate, brilliant, and handsome people I’ve ever met (BTW, we’re hiring). So, a big thanks to everyone here at Linode.

We also want to thank you for your business and support all these years. As a token of our gratitude, we’re announcing free RAM upgrades for both new and existing customers. Here’s the breakdown:

The free upgrade is available immediately. At the top of your Linode’s dashboard you will see the upgrade banner. It should be just the press of a button and a reboot for many of you, however sometimes a migration will be required – which typically just takes a few minutes.

This upgrade is available only for KVM Linodes. Legacy Xen Linodes will have to first upgrade to KVM before being able to take advantage of the RAM upgrade. You can upgrade your Xen Linodes to KVM using the “Upgrade to KVM” link on the lower-right side of your Linode’s dashboard.

Unfortunately, since Tokyo is sold out, the upgrade is not available there. We hope to have our second Tokyo facility online before the end of this year.

In addition to the new facility, our teams are working hard on the new API (in public alpha), the new open source Linode Manager, and the significant improvements to our networking infrastructure including transit, peering, and bandwidth upgrades. We’re also very excited about our future office in Philadelphia – a beautiful neoclassical 110-year-old former bank building right at the heart of N3RD Street. Renovations are underway and we hope to be working out of there in the spring.

We continue to build upon the foundations of a company that is big enough to handle its customers’ needs but small enough to care. We hope we’re accomplishing that. You have our eternal gratitude for your business. Stay tuned for more!

We are happy to announce that we have just pushed a new Arch image, updating it to the 2016.06.01 “release”. This image disables the predictable network interface naming convention using the suggested udev mask, so the default ethernet name is returned to eth0.

If you currently rely on predictable interface naming for any of your Linodes running Arch, make sure to update your configuration scripts before deploying from the newest image. If you want to read more about this configuration or static networking, see the documentation on freedesktop.org, or consult our Static IP Configuration guide. Alternately, you can let Network Helper configure your IP addresses statically for you.

We’re rounding out our robust conference schedule with even more events than usual this summer! Take a look below and meet up with us.

DrupalCon New OrleansNew Orleans, LA | May 9-13
We are sponsoring a lounge at DrupalCon New Orleans. Stop by our space to relax and recharge – perks of the Big Easy. We’ll also be hosting a happy hour in our lounge on May 10th @ 3 PM. See y’all in the Crescent City.

PyConPortland, OR | May 28-June 5
We’re flying to the West Coast for PyCon this year. We love Portland and can’t wait to see everyone at the conference. Stop by booth #521 to chat with our team and get $50 credit on a new Linode account.

Southeast LinuxfestCharlotte, NC | June 10-12SELF is being held in Charlotte again for 2016. We are looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new ones. We’ll have a table loaded with new swag in the expo hall, and we’ll be at the bottle share. Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina… in June. See you there.

Velocity Santa Clara, CA | June 20-23
We’re heading back to Santa Clara for Velocity 2016! Stop by our booth (#515) in the expo hall. We’re also sponsoring the evening reception on June 22nd from 8-10 p.m. We look forward to seeing everyone in Cali.

Texas LinuxfestAustin, TX | July 8-9
This will be our first year sponsoring Texas Linuxfest. Stop by our booth to get the latest, greatest Linode swag and make sure to attend the Linode after-party (location TBD). See everyone in Austin.

FOSSCONPhiladelphia, PA | August 20
We’re thrilled to again be part of FOSSCON – right in our own backyard, Philly. We’ll be hanging out all day talking cloud hosting and all things virtualized that you might be curious about. See you in our backyard this August.

In his January blog post, Alex Forster articulated that we have a plan in motion to upgrade the network across all of our data centers. We would like to share with everyone what has been done so far, and what still needs doing.

Staffing up

Since December 2015, we’ve added two new members to our Network Operations department with a total of 24 years of experience between them. Our new Network Operations Manager, Dan Spataro, brings with him a wealth of experience in the maintenance of backbone and data center networks. Owen Conway has also come over from LINX, one of the largest peering exchanges in the world. They have been working tirelessly along with our existing Network Operations crew to make substantial improvements to our network infrastructure, and have proven to be invaluable additions to our team.

Infrastructure Improvements

Status: In progressExpected Completion: Mid May

Phase one of our plan is to install new higher capacity networking hardware in every one of our locations. These new devices will greatly increase our capacity to the internet and allow us to multi-home to many internet peers at once. Our Network Operations team has been rolling out this new hardware as quickly as possible and is currently working on many simultaneous turn-ups with our providers. By mid-May we hope to have these installations complete.

Dark Fiber Turn-ups

Status: In progressExpected Completion: July

Due to infrastructure variations between geographic locations, we have had to get creative in our mission to turn up large amounts of additional bandwidth capacity at our various data centers in order to reach the tier 1 providers in each region. Our first plan involved the procurement of 200 Gbps of lit services from our data center locations to the well connected carrier hotels. The provider estimated a late June install date for the first location. That timeline was unacceptable to us, so we decided to lease our own dark fiber and light it ourselves. The time to market is much quicker and the potential capacity is much greater. Instead of the fixed 200 Gbps of capacity per DC we can turn up many terabits of capacity per DC on demand. We expect to begin rolling out the optical gear in the next few weeks and hope to have the first locations up in mid May.

Internet Capacity

Status: In progressExpected Completion: July

Internet capacity is a large part of our DDoS mitigation strategy – the more capacity, the better. We are currently working on turning up terabits of capacity to the Internet and have started to achieve this by peering with hundreds of Internet peers over many high capacity links. We have also reached agreements with three more tier 1 providers to provide us more connectivity to the Internet across all of our data center locations. We will begin installation of the first batch of connectivity from those agreements next week in Frankfurt.

Our entire Network Operations team has been working really hard to bring everyone these upgrades as quickly as possible. Your patience and understanding over the last few months have been greatly appreciated, and we look forward to sharing the benefits of these upgrades with everyone soon.